Particularly due to the rapid growth of electronic communication, such as, for example, e-mail, instant messaging and communication through social network services, the social networks of users of communication services become more and more widespread. This leads to an increasing number of contacts of the users, i.e. persons the users communicate with and/or with whom the users know how to communicate. Usually, a user stores his contacts of in a database such as an address book in order to avoid the need to remember the contact addresses. Moreover, address books allow for designating a contact as intended recipient of a communication by selecting the contact entry of the contact within a graphical environment presented at a communication device of the user.
Within the graphical environment, many address books provide a presentation of the contacts in a list that is sorted alphabetically. In order to select a contact the user may navigate within the list or he may enter at least part of a name or other contact detail of the contact. Here, contact entries which are highly ranked in the alphabetical order are presented at the beginning of the list and can be accessed easily by the user using relatively few inputs. For accessing contacts which are not ranked highly in the alphabetical order, the user has to scroll the list and/or enter the name of a contact in order to select the contact. For this purpose, significantly more inputs may be required.
It is a problem of the alphabetical order of the contact entries, that contacts which are highly ranked in the alphabetical order are not necessarily the most important contacts for the user, i.e., the contacts the user may wish to select more frequently. Thus, accessing the more relevant contact entries that are used more often may be more involved than accessing less important contact entries. This can be very tedious and unsatisfactory for the user.
In principle, the same problem arises in view of other data items pertaining to contacts of a user, such as messages received from and/or sent to the contacts. Such data items may also be arranged in the alphabetical order of the contacts having sent or received the data items or according to the time of receipt or sending. However, such an arrangement may likewise emphasize data items which are not the most relevant for the user and it may likewise be cumbersome for the user to identify and access important data items.